A double murderer has failed in a high court bid to overturn Queensland’s “no body, no parole” laws, in a case which also involved almost every other state and territory government.
Rodney Michael Cherry, 65, was found guilty in 2002 of killing his 35-year-old wife, Annette Cherry, and 18-year-old stepdaughter, Kira Guise, at Roma in central Queensland and sentenced to life in prison.
Annette Cherry’s body was found soon after she was killed but Kira’s remains have never been found.
Cherry’s lawyers claimed that laws which prevented him being granted parole because he was found to have not cooperated in efforts to locate Guise’s remains effectively “impermissibly granted judicial power” to the parole board, instead of the supreme court which had imposed his sentence.
But the high court rejected his appeal on Wednesday, finding that the law was not invalid. It referenced the cases of murderers Julian Knight and Craig Minogue in its judgment, other cases in which state governments intervened to prevent the release of a prisoner despite them being eligible for parole.
It found that alterations to laws governing parole did not result in additional punishment.
“The making of the no cooperation declaration did not change the plaintiff’s sentence (being at all times one of life imprisonment); nor did it increase it,” it said.
“The plaintiff’s eligibility for parole has always been dependent on the applicable legislative scheme, which may validly be amended from time to time.
“Indeed, it is open for a State Parliament to abolish the availability of parole entirely, a proposition which the plaintiff accepted.”
Lawyers for Cherry argued that his case was similar to a hypothetical used by Justice James Edelman in the case of Minogue, the Russell Street bomber.
In that case, Edelman, who also presided over Cherry’s case, said: “for instance, if a person were sentenced to a maximum term of 10 years imprisonment with a non-parole period of four years, the issue of whether a written law was an invalid exercise of judicial power may arise” if laws were subsequently changed that extended the non-parole period of that person to eight years for the purpose of increasing the severity of their punishment.
“It is respectfully submitted that the legislation impugned in this case is in the same category as the hypothetical example identified in the above passage from the judgment of Justice Edelman in Minogue,” Cherry’s lawyers argued.
This was because Queensland’s “no body, no parole” laws were passed after Cherry was sentenced, his lawyers said.
Cherry had his parole rejected in July 2023.
The high court ruled that Cherry should pay the costs of the case.
In December last year, the attorneys general for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory outlined their arguments to the high court in support of “no body, no parole” laws.
